Alessandro Volta

Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta (18 February 1745 – 5 March 1827) was an Italian chemist and physicist celebrated as one of the principal founders of the science of electricity. Best known as the inventor of the voltaic pile—the first true electric battery—and as the discoverer of methane, he transformed eighteenth-century natural philosophy into experimental physics and helped lay the foundations of electrochemistry. His innovations disproved the prevailing belief that electricity was generated only by living organisms and demonstrated that it could be produced chemically. The SI unit of electric potential, the volt, is named in his honour.
Widely admired throughout Europe, Volta spent nearly forty years as professor of experimental physics at the University of Pavia. His career earned him international recognition, honours from Napoleon Bonaparte, and lasting acclaim as a pioneer of electrical science.

Early Life and Marriage

Volta was born in Como, northern Italy, into a noble but not wealthy family. His father, Filippo Volta, came from a line of minor aristocrats, and his mother, Maddalena Inzaghi, was of a respected local family. After initially pursuing church studies, Volta shifted his focus to natural philosophy and experimental science.
In 1794 he married Teresa Peregrini, an aristocrat from Como. The couple had three sons—Zanino, Flaminio and Luigi—who remained central to Volta’s domestic life, especially during his later years of semi-retirement.

Early Scientific Work

In 1774 Volta became professor of physics at the Royal School in Como. A year later he improved and popularised the electrophorus, a device for generating static electricity. Although the device had been described earlier by Johan Wilcke, Volta’s promotion and redesign made it widely adopted in scientific laboratories.
Volta’s scientific curiosity led him to travel widely in Switzerland, where he met natural philosophers such as Horace-Bénédict de Saussure. Between 1776 and 1778 he conducted extensive studies on the chemistry of gases. He identified and isolated methane, after detecting it in the marshes near Lake Maggiore. His experiments culminated in demonstrations of methane combustion ignited by electric sparks, marking an early link between chemistry and electricity.
In addition to chemical research, Volta studied electrical capacitance, demonstrating that electric potential (V) and charge (Q) are proportional for a given conductor—an insight now known as Volta’s Law of Capacitance.

Professorship at Pavia

In 1779 Volta was appointed professor of experimental physics at the University of Pavia, a post he held for nearly four decades. His lectures attracted so many students that Emperor Joseph II ordered the construction of a new amphitheatre, the Aula Volta, to accommodate them. The emperor also financed the acquisition of scientific instruments, many of which are preserved today in the University History Museum at Pavia.

From Galvani to the Voltaic Pile

The path to Volta’s most important discovery began with his intellectual dispute with Luigi Galvani. Galvani’s experiments with frog legs led him to propose the theory of “animal electricity.” Volta correctly recognised that the electric current originated from the metals used in Galvani’s apparatus, not from the animal tissue, which functioned merely as a conductor.
By replacing the frog’s leg with brine-soaked paper, Volta demonstrated that electricity was generated by the contact between dissimilar metals. Through systematic experimentation he established the electrochemical series and the rule that the electromotive force (emf) of a metal pair is the difference between their electrode potentials.
In 1799 he crowned this research with the invention of the voltaic pile, the first continuous source of electric current. He described the discovery in a famous two-part letter to Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society, in 1800. The pile, composed of alternating zinc and copper disks separated by brine-soaked cardboard, produced a steady current and became the model for later batteries.
The impact was immediate: Volta’s pile launched the discipline of electrochemistry and stimulated major discoveries by Humphry Davy, Jöns Jacob Berzelius and others. Volta himself acknowledged the contributions of William Nicholson, Tiberius Cavallo and Abraham Bennet to his development of the device.

Later Career and Recognition

Volta’s breakthrough earned him widespread acclaim. Napoleon Bonaparte, deeply impressed by the voltaic pile, invited Volta to the Institut de France and maintained a lifelong admiration for him. Napoleon awarded him several honours and, in 1810, created him a Count of the Kingdom of Italy.
In 1809 Volta became an associated member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. He retired from university service in 1819 to his estate in Camnago near Como—now known as Camnago Volta—where he lived quietly with his family until his death in 1827.

Legacy

Volta’s influence endures in the history of science and in the terminology of modern physics:

• The volt, the SI unit of electric potential, bears his name.
• His laboratories and lecture halls are preserved at Pavia, including the Aula Volta.
• In Como, the Tempio Voltiano, a museum overlooking Lake Como, displays his instruments and manuscripts.
• The Como Conference of 1927 commemorated the centenary of his death and brought together leading physicists of the early twentieth century.
• His image appeared on Italian lira banknotes (1990–1997).
• In recent years he has been honoured through modern scientific nomenclature—for example, Nvidia’s Volta GPU microarchitecture and the electric eel species Electrophorus voltai, identified as the strongest natural generator of bioelectricity.